Overview

"A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath. In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and ""organize"" the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed ""improvement of the human species"" and practices of dehumanization."

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9780226825564

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Reviews

“This is a highly original study that breaks new ground and discusses fundamental issues in Enlightenment history, political theory, and biopolitics. With flawless scholarship and an extraordinary mastery of the many relevant controversies and debates of the time, Nelson fills a major gap in our knowledge of the Enlightenment. This book makes important contributions to Enlightenment scholarship and will compel us to rethink the balance between equality and inequality, as well as between inclusion and exclusion, in Enlightenment social and political thought.” * Siep Stuurman, author of The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History * “Enlightenment Biopolitics is a well-crafted book that intervenes in an important period using little-known documents. In this innovative work, Nelson offers a creative riposte to the canonical debate about social contract theory in the French eighteenth century and its echoes in modern discourse. Striking an impressive balance between shocking materials on human breeding and highly contextual readings of their implications, this book is a subtle and elegant contribution to the history of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution.” * Mackenzie Cooley, author of The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance *

Author Information

William Max Nelson is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One and a coeditor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective.

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